Whether you have a monthly contract or are on a “Pay As You Go” data plan, usage is most likely measured and charged by the megabyte or MBSo…

What is a megabyte (MB)? or kilobyte (kB)? or gigabyte (GB)?

​This still isn't much help unless you know what this means in terms of an amount of text, a number of images or minutes of video. So let’s try and put it in a way that relates to how we typically consume data.

How much data do I need?

It depends! There are many factors at play here, the most significant of which is your own data usage habits.This is why you need to a tool like datasquasher to track and control your data consumption.Once you start streaming audio and videos the figures will soon add up.

Many people will be reluctant to stream videos using their 3G/4G connections, mainly due to poor reception or coverage in their area, or simply because they are unsure of how much data they will use (a symptom known as Bill Shock Avoidance).

Below are some guidelines and examples to help you measure your data usage:

​WebsitesThe data consumed when looking at a website on your mobile varies hugely depending on the mix of text, images and video and whether the site has been optimized for use on a mobile device. Here are some examples:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/index.html​@ 12:00 30/3/2016

Size:27.4MB

http://www.wired.co.uk/​@ 12:00 30/3/2016

Size: 10.9MB

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news​@ 12:00 30/3/2016

Size: 27.4MB

Images​Image quality and size have a significant impact on data usage. Nearly every website, whether it's a desktop or mobile-optimised site, will have numerous images that can consume a sizeable amount of your data allowance.

* based on a 500MB data plan over a 30 day month (16MB per day)​Sending images via email and instant messaging apps also use up your mobile data. The image quality you choose when sending an image (Original, Large, Medium or Small) makes a big difference to the data you use.

Added to this, sending images (or video) uses more data than the photo file size as the photo needs to be converted to travel by email ( + see below for a bit of “tech speak” that explains this).

+ Why more data is used to send an image or video

Sending email is text based, using SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol). This was around before the Internet as we know it today, so a way of being able to send binary data (for images, videos & other attachments) also had to be found.​To do this, binary files are encoded into a text-based format. Because each text character can only hold a small amount of data, more is needed to represent the same file. Most files are encoded using MIME:See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIME if you want to know more.